That darn ‘$10 bottle of wine’

So apparently there’s this ever-present odyssey to find the mythical $10-bottle of wine that’s so awesome, so amazing, so darn desirable that it will sexually favor you and then even snuggle afterwards.  I guess, during these days of inflation and the like, maybe that should be upped to a $15-dollar bottle of wine, but what do I know.

In any case, it’s really an epic search.  You’d think that, the way these girls rabidly read the latest update on “This Season’s $10-Bottle,” that it was a gold-plated key to the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant and Hugh Hefner’s long-lost virginity.  I’ve sampled bottles in the $10-$20 range, and none of them have really blown my skirt up.

First off, I got a bottle of some Paso Robles … thing … for $10 on sale.  It tasted like, well, a red wine.  I can’t distinguish between reds, unless it’s flavored with something really significant, like pepper, asphalt, or dead baby.  We paired it with some venison, and the boys I was eating it with thought it went well with the meat, but wasn’t anything overly fantastic.  I just thought it needed something stronger and better in it, like vodka.   Or, hell, even a damn dead baby.

… I’m really doing badly at this whole process of learning to like wine.

Next up, I gave Thorn-Clarke’s Terra Bossa Shiraz a try.  The bottle costs around $17, and it’s a wine that comes from the Barossa Valley area of Australia.  Before I gave it a good try, I read up on it first.  Nothing in my readings gave me any suggestions for pairings, except for the marvelously vague “goes well with full-flavored meals.”  Thanks, jackasses.  But reviews did repeatedly mention a dark-chocolate aftertaste, so I took that and ran with it.  The wine did end up going well with a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark.  (At least, that’s what other people told me.  I still had a mouthful of red wine I couldn’t identify.)

Maybe diving head-first into red wines was a bad idea.  No, wait, scratch that — I didn’t dive; I hopped in like a flailing kid on uppers.